Atomfall: Optimized Setings

Rebellion went a very different direction from the usual Sniper Elite blueprint, and they've decided to veer into the post-apocalyptic lands inhabited by the likes of Metro and Stalker.

But how does Atomfall perform on PC, and what changes should you make to keep your PC from feeling its suffered its own type of nuclear reaction?

Test Rig:

• RTX 3080 10GB
• 32 GB DDR5 6000MHZ RAM
• Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Optimized Settings

Atomfall is a weird PC port. It does a lot of things well, which want to praise Rebellion for:

• You can choose between Exclusive Fullscreen, Borderless, and Windowed Modes. A rarity these days, unfortunately.
• There are a lot of quality options for each setting, instead of the frequent trio of Low, Medium, High.

Image Credit: Rebellion. Screenshot by Blast.

• The settings menu shows the visual and performance impact of your changes in real time, in the right hand side of the screen.
• Instead of a Shadows setting encapsulating all options, Atomfall lets us individually change things like Ambient Occlusion, Screen Space Shadows, and Obscurance Fields. The more options, the better.

These are all excellent features of a PC port, and should be mandatory, especially in higher budget projects, so good job here, Rebellion.

Unfortunately, on the other hand, a lot of these settings seem to have little to no impact on performance. They do change the game's visuals a lot, though.

The only two settings that had a ton of impact on performance on your testing were:

• Draw Distance: pretty self explanatory setting, changing this from Ultra to Low gave us a whopping 10+ FPS boost (from low 70s to low 80s). Pop-in and detail at a distance gets really rough. We recommend Medium at a minimum.

Image Credit: Rebellion. Screenshot by Blast.

• Texture Detail: this setting can also give you 8 to 10 FPS increase (low to high 70s). Ultra looks quite crisp, but High is a great compromise.
• Ambient Occlusion has an impact on performance, but the loss of visual quality is too high. We recommend keeping it on.

Atomfall Quirks

This game has no Temporal Anti-Aliasing solution, not even any of the upscaling techniques we're used to seeing in most PC releases. There is no DLSS, FSR, or XESS available here.

The only option you have is a Rendering Scale, which can be used to boost the resolution beyond your screen's output, but at a considerable performance cost.

Due to the lack of TAA or similar options, the game has a lot of shimmering in motion, especially on the lush foliage seen throughout the game.

With this in mind, we recommend keeping AA to Ultra no matter your specs, as the shimmering gets progressively worse the lower the setting is.

Image Credit: Rebellion. Screenshot by Blast.

Additionally, if you have a beefy enough rig, boost the rendering resolution above 100%, as high as you can get it while maintaining your desired framerate, to minimize the shimmering beyond what the Ultra setting can achieve.

Finally, we recommend you do your own testing, but as mentioned by Thomas Morgan in his latest Digital Foundry video, the aforementioned multiple shader options can feel a bit overkill.

Test it out for yourself by changing the settings while keeping a character on the screen, but we personally turned off Obscurance Fields to prevent the characters from looking oddly dark, especially in interior spaces.

READ: Atomfall: How to find and use the Metal Detector